In online manufacturing of articles, materials are often supplied as web materials and subsequently cut into pieces during the manufacturing process. The supply of web materials has the advantage that large quantities of the material can be supplied to the manufacturing process as a single piece of web material. The web material may be supplied as roll stock or in festooned form. The latter form is preferred when the web material has a relatively large thickness dimension such that the lifetime of a roll of this material would be relatively short.
Packages of festooned web material are well known in the art and are described for example in documents U.S. Pat. No. 3,729,367 (Shore), EP-A-0 366 038 (Felix), EP-A-0 383 501 (Foster).
There have also been described, see for example WO-A-98/58864 (O'Connor et al.), packages of festooned web material in which a plurality of stacks of the material has been arranged in side-by-side fashion such that by splicing the end of one that to the beginning of the neighboring stack one continuous strip of web material can be obtained. The slices, however, had to be carried out by hand in particular because the arrangement of the stacks requires that one of the into pieces is twisted by an annual 360 degrees around the longitudinal dimension of the web material.
Therefore, it has been an object of the present invention to provide an apparatus and a process for automatic splicing of neighboring stacks of festooned web material.